IST 653 Digital Libraries

Meet your neighbor

• Name • Major and track• Favorite book or graphic novel• You were a CEO at Apple, and you are now rich

and retired. What would you like to do with all of you free time and money?

What is a Digital Library?

• Anyone, anywhere, will be able to easily locate and use any image, text, database, or other type of digital resource — often in sophisticated ways or in association with other related objects (Roy Tennant)

• The only requirements: – access to the Internet

What is a Digital Library?

• A Digital Library (also referred to as digital library) is a special library with a focused collection of digital objects that can include text, visual material, audio material, video material, stored as electronic media formats (as opposed to print, microform, or other media), along with means for organizing, storing, and retrieving the files and media contained in the library collection.

Definition(s)

• Digital libraries are organizations that provide the resources, including the specialized staff, to select, structure, offer intellectual access to, interpret, distribute, preserve the integrity of, and ensure the persistence over time of collections of digital works so that they are readily and economically available for use by a defined community or set of communities.

Why Digital Library?

• Access: brings library to users• always available; better and wider delivery• many libraries now possible to use• Sharing: information resources; linking• Timeliness: easier to keep current• Searching, browsing: use of computer power• Information resources: new forms possible• Services: new & new forms possible• Costs: may save effort, money??

What are the precedents?

• The story of how the digital library came about was through varied and many needs, ideas, technology, and standards.

• Many different people from various business sectors and myriad of academic disciplines.

• Many events that happen, some sequentially, others concurrently, and sometimes out of left field.

• And, some happened merely out of shear luck!

The history of computing

• It’s 2016! Is the future here?• Science Fiction says it’s supposed to be:– 1984 set in (wait for it…) 1984– Blade Runner set in 2019– 2001 set in (wait for it…) 2001– Rollerball set in 2018

• We’re not flying around inspace packs, but we’ve still come a long way baby.

Analog & Digital Computing

ENIAC first Digital ComputerENIGMA Machine

ARP Synthesizerdifferential analyzer

Background to Digital Library

The “Memex” by Vannever Bush

Miniaturization of Information

• Microfilm• Aperture cards• Microform

Dream of the Paperless Office

Douglas Engelbart

• Groupware• hypertext• Email• Chat• Calendaring

• Mouse• Windowing

“The Mother of All Demos” (1968)

Xerox PARC

Legacy of Engelbart and Xerox

• Engelbart's work directly led to the advances at Xerox PARC.

• In 1973, Xerox PARC developed the Alto personal computer.

• desktop metaphor and graphical user interface (GUI).

• Steve Jobs andWoziniak take a tour of Xerox PARC and “copy” their ideas to make the Apple Lisa, the first PC with a GUI and mouse.

-MARC (MAchine Readable Cataloging)-MARC became a national standard in 1971

The Rise of MARC

Henriette Avram

OCLC’s World Cat

• Z39.50 is a national and international (ISO 23950) standard defining a protocol for computer-to-computer information retrieval. Z39.50 makes it possible for a user in one system to search and retrieve information from other computer systems (that have also implemented Z39.50) without knowing the search syntax that is used by those other systems. Z39.50 was originally approved by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) in 1988.

Advent of theILS (Integrated Library Systems)

• acquisitions (ordering, receiving, and invoicing materials)

• cataloging (classifying and indexing materials)• circulation (lending materials to patrons and

receiving them back)• serials (tracking magazine and newspaper

holdings)• the OPAC (public interface for users)

OPACs (Online Public Access Catalogs)

Advent of Web Programming• JAVA and Applets• PHP, Coldfusion, Ruby• “scripting languages”

– Perl– Java Script– CSS

• HTML/XML• Frameworks,

– MVC (Model View Controller)– ZEND– Rails– Bootstrap

Advent of SGML & XML

• XML developed in 1998• aka, eXtensible Markup Language• Evolved out of SGML, or Standard

Generalized Markup Language• SGML is a language that dates back to 1960s• SGML developed by the work of 3 people, most

notably Charles Goldfarb • Harvard Law Grad that wanted a way to share

docs and coined term “markup language”21

Moore’s LawIn an article published on April 19, 1965, Moore observed that the number of components (transistors, resistors, diodes or capacitors) in a dense integrated circuit had doubled approximately every year, and speculated that it would continue to do so for at least the next ten years.

Internet

• ARPANET or DARPANET (1966)• Used a new way to move information over wires

using “Packets” (1961)• Communication was largely analog until then• New refinements and technological upgrades led

to “Internet”• Gave way to:– Bulletin board systems (BBS) / Usenet– Accessible by “Telnetting in”

Database & Webserver

• Relational Databases– Oracle– MySQL– MS SQL

• Apache Webserver• Windows Server• Sun SPARC

25

Infrastructure for Digital Libraries• “Gore Bill” or High Performance Computing

& Communication Act of 1991• HTML or HyperTextMarkupLanguage

developed 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the WWW

• Not widely used until HTML 2.0 was released, 1995. HTML 4.0 1998, and HTML 5.0 in 2011

• HTML simplified SGML so that non-experts could markup documents

Scanning & Storage

• Flatbed Scanner 1978 (Xerox PARC, again!)• Digital camera 1975 (Steven Sasson at Kodak)• Compact Disc and Laser Disc 1970s• MPEG (digital audio and video) 1993• Flatbed scanner 1975 (Ray Kurzweil)• OCR (Optical Character Recognition) 1975 (Ray

Kurzweil)

Early Digital LIbraries• Project Gutenberg (Michael Hart) 1971– Published books on ARPANET and BBS and Gopher

• Internet Archive 1996 (Brewster Kahle)• Wayback (WABAC) Machine 1996 (Brewster

Kahle)• Making of America 1995– Michigan & Cornell

• Library of Congress 1995 NDLP

Recent and notable

• HathiTrust 2008• Salman Rushdie 2008?• Million Book Project 2007 (Carnegie Mellon)• Google book project 2005 via Harvard, NYPL

et. al.• DPLA 2013

Technology & Standards

• Dublin Core 1995• Encoded Archival Description (EAD) 1993• Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) 1994• Metadata Encoding and Transmission

Standard (METS) 2001• PREservation Metadata: Implementation

Strategies (PREMIS) 2005• MARCXML 2002

Technology & Standards

• Open Archives Initiative (OAI) 2006?• Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata

Harvesting (OAI-PMH) 2002• OAIster Michigan (2002) then to OCLC (2009)• DSpace 2002• VUFind 2012

Curators in the analog world

Digital Curation

• Digital curation is the selection, preservation, maintenance, collection and archiving of digital assets. Digital curation establishes, maintains and adds value to repositories of digital data for present and future use. This is often accomplished by archivists, librarians, scientists, historians, and scholars. Enterprises are starting to use digital curation to improve the quality of information and data within their operational and strategic processes.

Digital Curation (by another name)

• Archivist (Digital Archivist)• Electronic Record Archivist• Cataloger/metadata specialist• Librarian• Systems Librarian• Web developer• Data curation• And so on…

Emergency contact information

• Name• Track• Where you live generally (no specifics) in case

of an emergency